The View From TC: Fariña is an Educator's Chancellor

Carmen Fariña, the
new Chancellor of the New York City public school system, has worked extensively
with the TC Reading and Writing Project and served on the Board of the
College’s Cahn Fellows Program for Distinguished Principals. Public officials
have certainly been known to tack in new directions when they take on larger
roles, but the leaders of these TC programs believe Fariña’s past track record provides a clear
indication of how she’ll run the nation’s largest school system.

“Carmen respects teachers and educators, and she believes the school system
should be in the hands of teachers and educators,” said the Reading and Writing
Project’s Founding Director Lucy Calkins, TC’s Robinson Professor of Children’s
Literature, who has worked with Fariña for more than two decades.

“She believes that school culture really matters,” said Cahn Fellows founder
and benefactor Charles Cahn, who used the word “enormous” to described Fariña’s
influence on the program. “It was because of Carmen that we modified our
curriculum to include a session on climate and culture. She also believes that
the principal is critical to how well a school does. I think she’ll make the
role of the principal even more significant.”

“Carmen respects and profoundly understands teaching and learning,” said
Jacqueline Ancess, Co-Director of the National Center for Restructuring
Education, Schools and Teaching, who was colleague of Fariña’s in New York City District
2. “We have never had someone like that as Chancellor. It is important because
changing teaching and learning is the most difficult thing to do in education.”

Fariña, a
former New York City teacher, principal, regional superintendent and, most
recently, Deputy Chancellor for Teaching and Learning, serving as number 2 to Chancellor
Joel Klein until her retirement in 2006, was born
in Spain and immigrated to the United States with her family as a child. The
experience of entering school as a non-English-speaking student profoundly
shaped Fariña’s
philosophy as an educator, she recalls in the 2008 book she co-authored with
Laura Kotch, A
School Leader’s Guide to Excellence:
Collaborating Our Way to Better Schools (Heinemann, 2008), to which Calkins wrote the forward.

“My kindergarten teacher consistently
marked me absent when I didn’t respond to the name she consistently
mispronounced during roll call,” writes Fariña. "In a very real sense, my father was my first teacher. He
accompanied me to school and insisted in his own quiet way that my kindergarten
teacher repeat the correct pronunciation of my name after him so that she would
honor his daughter’s presence in her classroom. The marginalization I felt
because of my teacher’s inability or unwillingness to pronounce my foreign last
name has remained with me and has created my deep commitment to welcoming,
nurturing and personalizing every student, teacher and principal from the first
time we meet through the entire time we work together.”

To
those who have seen her in action, Fariña’s early experiences
have translated into an insistence on teaching that taps students’ passions and
welcomes the challenges they pose to received wisdom.

“I recall first meeting her in the mid 1980s when I visited her sixth-grade
classroom in Brooklyn to observe a lesson demonstrating arts integration,” said
Ancess. “She was a teacher at the time. As part of a social studies unit on South
Africa, the students were discussing Kaffir
Boy, the autobiography of a black youth living under apartheid. The debate
was so vigorous, the students were so involved, and Carmen's questions were so
stimulating and challenging that it was hard to believe that the students were
sixth graders. I remember thinking that they seemed more like unusually short
college students. The experience provided an indelible image of great teaching
and learning.”

What Fariña is not, observers seem to agree, is an ideologue. “She’s
forthright, and she has a strong point of view on the things she cares about,
which is making schools succeed and ensuring that kids get a really good
education,” Cahn said. “She knows the school system, and what a good teacher is
and a good principal is. So she lets you know where she stands – but she’s
willing to hear others’ points of view.”

Calkins added that the new Chancellor will be unafraid “to say that the
emperor has no clothes,” particularly when it comes to taking stock of policies
“that look good on paper but are impossible or absurd to implement,” such as a
directives that currently require principals to conduct hundreds of classroom
observations during the school year or to spend so much time sifting through
student data that “they have no time left to actually learn about students from
students’ work.

“People say she’s blunt and plainspoken, and it’s true,” said Calkins. “She’s not afraid to say ‘No’ – and she’ll
say ‘No’ as much as she needs to in order to be able to say ‘Yes’ to what she
really believes in.”

Yet even as she champions flexible teaching and individualized instruction, Fariña also
believes in the power of school-wide and system-wide approaches.

“Throughout her career, there have
been so many ways that she has used systems to enable collaboration and the
sharing of resources – and that’s been foundational to how the Reading and
Writing Project works,” said Calkins.

For example, as principal of PS 6
on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Fariña appointed a lead teacher for each
subject at each grade. The lead teachers then came together in “k-5 articulation
teams” for each subject so as to ensure continuity and to avoid duplication
across grades. “To make sure that teachers across the school learned from each
other and that good ideas were regularly shared, Carmen also wanted grade-level
cohorts groups of teachers to function as think tanks,” Calkins said. “So she
gave all her teachers an extended lunch four days a week in return for one
lunch a week being reserved for teachers across a grade level to collaborate
together during a working lunch. Those grade-specific working lunches were
scheduled on different days of the week so that Carmen could join each one.”

Fariña also rechristened the principal’s “walk through” — which in many
schools had become time when school leaders walk through a building, checklist
in hand, noting everything that was not yet happening — into “ Glory Walks.”

“Her goal was to find the beauty, the pockets of rigor,” Calkins said. “And
then she’d send people from across the building and the City to learn from that
work so that those practices would spread.”

Asking teachers to think and study and talk together so they develop common
practices is part of the new chancellor’s deep commitment to creating learning cultures
within a school, district or system, said Calkins, whom Fariña looked to as a
mentor. “Carmen is all about making sure that everyone’s learning curve is
sky-high—including her own. She is an avid learner, and believe that schools
need to be places where administers, staff, parents, teachers, and children all
learn to outgrow themselves.”

Calkins, whom Fariña has called her
mentor, says Fariña’s approaches profoundly influenced her own thinking.
“Earlier in my career, I thought of systems as constraining and limiting, but
Carmen helped me to think of them as life-giving. Whereas I had previously
encouraged each teacher to invent his or her own curriculum, I learned from
Carmen that it would be life-giving and generative for not only Teacher A to be
teaching essay writing in December, but also Teachers B and C. That way they
could be supported by the system and by each other. The concept of shared units
of study, anchored by collaborative study, began with Carmen’s leadership.”

Fariña’s stances on a number of
other issues are well documented. She believes strongly in professional
development for teachers. In addition, she is an advocate of workshop teaching;
her support for a rich approach to social studies includes an emphasis on
social justice; she’s been vocal about the importance of the arts; and she has
championed a diverse student mix in classrooms (she disbanded the gifted and
talented program at PS 6). Fariña also believes that while standardized testing
has a place, the practice is limited in its ability to reflect students’
abilities or diagnose their needs.

Fariña also is “famous for being
sure that parents are at the table,” Calkins said. “Since her retirement from
the role of Deputy Chancellor, she worked part time with the Reading and
Writing Project to mentor school principals. She developed something of a
specialty in helping principals forge vibrant relationships with their parent-groups,
and was often brought in to talk to the parent body at a school. There is no question that the tone of the
system’s relationship with parents will change markedly.

“I’m sure she’s not going to spend her time sitting in the office,” Calkins said.
“She’ll be visiting schools, community meetings, thinking together with
principals, working with children whenever she can. She’ll do everything she can to develop a
vision that comes from a lot of listening.”